So running the ticket confirmation process, meeting and greeting attendees on the day and a fair bit of tweeting from the Manchester Girl Geeks account (as well as my own) was a great way to connect with faces old and new.

In between these activities I made it to a few of the talks – all of which were excellent. Topics ranged from women and digital music production, to what it takes to produce a podcast, and life after PhD study.

I also had a great chat with a teachers @upsideteach and @Mr_G_ICT and digital project manager @ColetteWeston about the challenges of teaching ICT and computing from Year 1 right through to Year 13.

Although I didn’t do a talk myself it was great fun to take part in the ‘slideshow karaoke’. In this challenge you are asked to give a convincing-sounding presentation to accompany a deck of slides that a) you’ve never seen before and b) are on a subject you know nothing about.

It took all my powers of improvisation to busk my way through a talk on combat vehicles in South Africa and try to convince the audience that badgers wearing body armour were capable of driving tanks.

This was topped by @jedw‘s efforts to speak authoritatively about golf – we were all fascinated to hear about the nine erogenous zones of a golf course!

Finally, as I’d managed to lose my raffle tickets, I offered to pick the tickets out for the fabulous prizes we’d lined up for the day. It was great to see the winners faces when they picked up their goodies.

I feel truly blessed to live in a city where there are more ‘ideas’ type events than it would be physically possible for me to attend. This week I gave Pint of Science a try.

What is Pint of Science?

Pint of Science was set up by two research scientists at Imperial College, Michael Motskin and Praveen Paul, who recognised that people from outside academia wanted to learn about their work.

This year, Manchester was one of the dozen host cities in the UK, with talks running from the 18th to 20th May. As the name would suggest, many of the events were held in pubs and bars.

Discovering drug discovery

Dr Allan Jordan, Head of Chemistry at Cancer Research UK, was lined up to tell us about ‘Breaking Bad Stereotypes: Real Stories of Drug Discovery’ at The English Lounge near the Northern Quarter.

The talk kicked off with the speaker asking us what the four most used drugs are. The audience quickly ticked of caffeine, nicotine and alcohol, before he revealed that chocolate was a drug too.

This was typical of the accessible way that Dr Jordan explained the concepts involved in drug discovery, from relating DNA codons to a passage from Dr Seuss’ ‘Green Eggs and Ham’ to using marshmallows, strawberry laces and Jelly Tots to model cells.

Hands up who likes Pint Of Science (Dr Allan Jordan)

I’ve never seen Breaking Bad, so I may have missed some of the analogies in the talk, but it was a part of the storytelling rather than the science and I didn’t feel it affected my understanding.

There were serious messages shared too. Drug discovery is a long-term investment for the companies that research new treatments for something as complex as cancers. It is expensive and very few medicines make it to the market.

Dr Jordan closed by saying that there has been a move towards collaboration in developing medicines, with commercial players increasingly willing to work with others, a scenario which seems a world away from the stereotypes associated with Big Pharma.